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Tales from the Other Side of Language 67 unaware of anyone or the studio. A voice accosts my brooding, and I pull my face around to the sound. A young, sweet-faced student looks up at me, disbelief and curiosity in her eyes, “Are these really your feelings?” I look down toward her as if miles of ether wobble the air between us. I can’t speak anything to her chaste look. She knows nothing about such grief, and I have no way in the vast distance between us, and in the bedlam in my heart, to tell her anything in words just now. I want to hang the trio on the wall in my office, but I’ve made the clay too thick, bulky. It won’t hang anywhere, even on the side of my garage. I find a place for it in the bottom of my garden, hidden under a bushy, redtwig dogwood. Leigh and I take many classes together, enormously enjoying each other’s zest in quietly rowdying up students and teachers. We are having a quiet tea together one Saturday in my apartment. Nothing is ever quiet with Leigh, and we get high on enthusiasm. Suddenly I say, “You paint one way, and I, totally differently. What do you think what would happen if we painted together on the same piece of paper—an experiment?” “Awesome!” she says. “But not at the same time. You start one, give it to me, we’ll go back and forth with it, and see what happens.” I start in my studio with a swash blue-scarlet color, an arc on large, rough, half-elephant size watercolor paper, a starting gesture. I hand it off to her and wait. In her studio she adds a jaunty house and a long, fragile ladder up the side. I add, she adds, and we pass it back and forth in a dance with it. She uses contained symbols: arrows, stop signs, house forms, and ladders. I use brash gestural strokes with my abstracted bits of flower forms. I get mad when she paints over everything I’ve done. Her painting is like archeology, layers and layers heaped on one another. I want fresh bits of paper left. The colors in the paintings we make are bright, in motion, alive. A white tower sits at a precarious angle in a swirl of black, green, and red. Its top is crowned in golden yellows with arcs of white and black arrows whizzing
68 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: around it. A fragile outline of a tall, skinny house looms through black clouds at the side. Death is a conscious part of these paintings. Death lives inside both of our lives, present, vibrant, and vital. After we have made many paintings together, again on impulse, we push-pin a two-by-two group of paintings onto my white high-ceilinged living room wall and see them become a single mosaic. We add more around them so they fill up the whole wall, twenty-four paintings. The effect is a swirl of color and motion, each piece radiating energy to the others. It is a deep, wild expression of the life of life, death inside it.
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We must be willing to give up the l
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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Tales from the Other Side of Langua
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house as sentient. Tales from the O
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is now. Tales from the Other Side o
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lives around him in deep and import
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“Without Utterance is a testimoni
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